C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

9.5.5. Numeric Conversions

Strings often contain characters that represent numbers. For example, we represent the numeric value 15 as a string with two characters, the character '1' followed by the character '5'. In general, the character representation of a number differs from its numeric value. The numeric value 15 stored in a 16-bit short has the bit pattern 0000000000001111, whereas the character string "15" represented as two Latin-1 chars has the bit pattern 0011000100110101. The first byte represents the character '1' which has the octal value 061, and the second byte represents '5', which in Latin-1 is octal 065.

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